


In Each of the Places We Meet

by blithers



Category: New Girl
Genre: Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, F/M, Five Times, Growing Up Together, One Night Stands
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-23
Updated: 2013-12-23
Packaged: 2018-01-05 19:25:25
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1097711
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Four ways that Nick and Jess never got together, and one way they did.</p>
            </blockquote>





	In Each of the Places We Meet

**Author's Note:**

  * For [missnumbat](https://archiveofourown.org/users/missnumbat/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide missnumbat! I hope you enjoy this treat. Thank you to [innie](http://innie-darling.livejournal.com/) for beta reading, and [Kyra](http://kyrafic.tumblr.com/) for the poem and beta reading. Spoilers through season two.

\---

**Lawyer.**

Nick's boss is John Wayne, James Bond, and some guy from a cologne ad who smells like animal magnetism and broken promises all rolled up into one. Russell has got it _going on_ , man. Where Nick feels awkward and ill at ease in the suits and button-downs Schmidt forces him to wear, Russell walks into the boardroom like he owns it, shirt cuffs neatly pressed and collar points sharp as knives. Nick lives with two roommates in an open-floor loft, like some cheap L.A. knockoff of _Friends_ , but Russell lives in an actual _house_ \- no, strike that, it's definitely a mansion - in a _mansion_ , like an adult. An adult with a metric fuckton of money.

(Nick sat in Russell's leather chair at the office once. It had been buttery soft and smelled like an old library and being a cowboy in the Wild West and Nick had instinctively understood in that moment that this was something he was never going to live up to. He's pretty sure that one day soon, the rest of the world is going to see through him and figure that out, too. And on that day, Nick Miller, the guy who never really deserved to be a lawyer: he is going to be _boned_.)

\---

The first time he meets Jess, he's lurking against the back wall during a corporate mixer, pinned to the striped wallpaper as only a guy wearing a pretentiously douchey sweater can be. She's pretty, he knows that much, with dark curls unbound around her shoulders and a satiny dress that makes her look like a classy housewife from the 1950s, or a brunette version of Samantha from _Bewitched_. He wonders if she can wiggle the tip of her nose.

She's drinking a glass of white wine. There's a streak of glitter smeared up the line of her throat.

He can't stop staring at the glitter.

"Excuse me," he says, "but did you know you have…" He gestures toward her face, but his fingers come a little too close and accidentally brush the underside of her jaw. Her pulse flutters underneath his fingertips for one brief, startlingly clear second, and she takes in a sharp breath.

Nick's mouth goes dry.

"…glitter," he manages to stammer out, fumbling the word awkwardly. He swallows. "You have glitter. Right… there."

Her hand flies to her throat, pressing up against the vein, and she laughs - a little nervously, he thinks, but her laughter is deeper and richer than he expects. Her cheeks flush up pink. Her eyes are wide and a startling shade of blue, like Lake Michigan after a front goes through, and Nick realizes then, with a faint sense of growing unease, that this girl is much more than just pretty.

She says something about being a teacher, about glitter being an occupational hazard, and he nods mutely in agreement. She swipes ineffectively at the underside of her jaw, smearing the glitter around and getting it all over her fingers.

"Here," he says, and grabs a cloth napkin off the table, dipping the corner in a glass of water. "I can…" He can't seem to finish a damn sentence around her. He reaches for her instead and carefully curls his fingers around the back of her neck. She isn't looking at his face anymore; she's fixed her gaze somewhere past his right shoulder, and her breathing is shallow as he dabs the moistened napkin at her throat.

"Better," he says finally. He's going for brisk, but his voice comes out in a whisper. His thumb lingers by her jaw of its own volition, pressed gently into the skin, and a faint tinge of white blossoms under his fingertip.

"Thanks," she breathes. She looks back up at him then. The tip of her tongue darts out to lick at the corner of her mouth. Her mouth is red and sweet looking, and he thinks… maybe…

"Jess!"

Nick starts. Russell is waving at both of them from across the room. Nick looks around, confused for one stupid, stupid second.

Russell makes his way over and wraps an arm around the woman in front of him - _Jess_ , some unhelpful part of his mind points out, _her name is Jess, you dumb schmuck_ \- and she beams up at Russell. "I see you've met Nick," Russell says to her, because that's the kind of upstanding guy he is. "New at the company. Mind sharp as a tack, this one. He's gonna go far."

"We hadn't been introduced yet," Jess says with a weird calmness, holding out her hand. "Nice to meet you. I'm Jess, Russell's fiancée."

\---

Three months later, he's holed up with Jess on a balcony in the middle of the California winter, because doors are the worst and they've accidentally locked themselves outside, on a freaking balcony, in the middle of another corporate shindig. _We've got to stop meeting like this_ , he wants to say, but thinks better of it.

Jess tucks her knees up under her skirt miserably. Nick manages to make the suggestion that they sit next to each other for warmth not sound totally skeevy, which is how he ends up with an arm around Jess's shoulders, listening to her explain about Spencer (who sounds like a real douchebag - way to do a number on a girl, man) and a little bit about Paul and how she met Russell, after that.

He invites Jess out for a drink at the bar, and makes sure Schmidt and Winston show up as well. Schmidt spends half the night pestering Jess for details about her model best friend while Winston slowly gets smashed on piña coladas in the corner. Nick's pretty pleased with how everybody gets along, but after they get home that evening (and finish pouring a cheerfully drunk Winston into bed), Schmidt stares at him hard for several long seconds in the dark apartment, spits out an "Are you _kidding_ me, Nicholas," and slams the door to his bedroom on the way out.

A month after that, Nick gets into an intense, near-screaming argument with Jess next to the hors d'oeuvre table about turn signal etiquette when driving. The fight is only broken up when Russell shows up and beams his amazing smile and tells Nick that he's thrilled that Jess has somebody to talk with at these boring things.

Nick gives them both a thumbs-up and smiles weakly.

It's not like he doesn't know that his little crush on Jess is a terrible idea.

It's not like he can help himself.

\---

It lasts until Winston solemnly hands him a thick envelope in the kitchen. Schmidt is lurking by the counter, pouring a cup of coffee and making this weirdly sympathetic face in Nick's direction. The paper of the envelope is smooth and heavy, probably the classiest paper Nick has ever laid a hand on, and that should have been his first clue.

It's dumb, in retrospect, that he never saw this moment coming.

"It's the wedding invitation, man," Winston says softly. "Jess and Russell. Later this summer."

Nick feels something inside of him freeze up and go numb.

Schmidt comes up and cups his hands around Nick's face, thumbs on his cheekbones and gazing deep into his eyes. "You're better than this," Schmidt says fiercely, and behind him Winston nods. "You have so much to give to this world."

Nick bats Schmidt's hands away. "It's fine." Nick clears his throat, because there's something stuck there that shouldn't be. "I'm happy for them. It's fine. And don't gaze into my eyes like that, Schmidt. It's weird, and you know it."

He texts Jess that evening and asks her out for a drink. It's the stupidest of the stupid things, he knows that, so he tells Winston and Schmidt he got a late call into the office and puts on a suit to make the lie reasonable. She shows up at the bar in a pink mini skirt and a knitted sweater with ugly, knobby cables, teasing him about the business suit. He fidgets nervously with his beer. There's a strange, distant buzzing in his head, drowning out Jess's words, so he stares at the glossy curls of her hair against her shoulder instead. Wisps keep getting caught in the scratchy wool of the cabling.

He reaches a hand up to absently brush her hair back, and Jess's voice stutters on the word _bouquet_. She licks her lips and stares at him.

He kisses her then, the bravest thing Nick Miller has ever done, and for one brilliant moment she kisses him back. Her fingers come up to thread behind his neck. It's like the kiss at the end of Sleeping Beauty, except Nick thinks that maybe Jess is the prince and he's the one who has been living under a spell his entire life, dreaming of empty castles. He feels her from the tips of his fingers down to the bones of his toes. Jess breaks the kiss slowly, pulling back to look at him, lips swollen and a dazed expression in her eyes. Nick clears his throat.

\---

She says no.

\---

Nick works a lot of overtime that summer, because he doesn't know what else to do with himself. He doesn't like being a lawyer, but he doesn't know how to be anything else. If he could go back in time, he'd scream at his younger self to give up the damn game, that showing up his father isn't worth a life being a cog in the corporate machine. But he can't, so he pulls all-nighters doing the legal footwork for an acquisition Russell is spearheading. He dates a stripper for a while, because it feels different and daring and not like something Nick Miller would do.

(The stripper ends up stealing his clothes and wallet and abandoning him at a cabin in the woods during a romantic weekend getaway, so that goes just about as well as everything else in Nick's life.)

Jess marries Russell on a Saturday in August, wearing an asymmetrical white dress with pale pink flowers woven in her hair. She's smiling and laughing and looks so beautiful that Nick (who has ceremonially gotten very, very drunk for the occasion) wants to lock himself in a bathroom and punch something until it breaks, or maybe cry.

Nick tries to convince himself that Jess's smile looks a little sad sometimes, when she thinks no one else is looking.

 

 

\---

**College.**

He meets Jess his freshman year at Syracuse. Three months later he kisses her for the first time, heart pounding painfully beneath his ribs, standing outside the metal and glass doors to the dorms. She's wearing translucent purple tights and a hat with some sort of crazy flower-thing going on. He feels it when she smiles against his lips. His head is swimming and he can barely get enough oxygen to his lungs, but he thinks that the world going dark is worth it for nothing more than this moment, right here, kissing this strange, wonderful girl like it's the most important thing he'll do in his entire life.

\---

They break up for the first time four months later.

It's stupid, totally stupid, 100% grade-A stupid.

"Oh my God," he moans, sinking his face into his hands, "why are you so annoying?"

Jess sticks her chin out belligerently and stares down at him. She's been practicing her teacher look on him and Nick hates it, hates it, hates it. "I don't know, _Nicholas_. Why do you literally _moonwalk away from me_ if I try to ask you if you like me? I mean, we make out for a while and then you disappear and I don't understand what this _is_ to you. What am I? Am I your girlfriend? What _is_ this?"

"THAT IS NOT THE QUESTION," he yells, feeling his face go red and hot, and it flusters him. It flusters him bad.

She stares at him for a while. "Maybe it should be," she says finally, and slams the dorm room door on her way out.

\---

The next year they end up in the same American Civil War history class, because Nick is checking off a liberal arts pre-req and Jess is just really into Abraham Lincoln. She brings sparkly glitter pens to class and dots the 'i' in Lincoln with a heart, and sometimes she gives the capital letters in Civil War a jaunty stovepipe top hat, and whenever Nick catches a glimpse of her notes during class it makes him weirdly, irrationally angry.

So, of course, they end up assigned to the same team for their final project. (Of _course_ they do.) Jess calls Abraham Lincoln _Abs_ Lincoln the whole time, and wiggles her eyebrows way too much, but they manage a good enough presentation. They all end up at this kid Alfredo's place to celebrate with his five dance major housemates after the last class. Nick gets comfortably stoned, Jess gets tipsy on wine coolers, and they end up making out in this little alcove that's strung up with tiny white Christmas lights.

Nick finally gets up the courage to mumble into Jess's neck that he misses her, that he _misses her_. Jess goes very still underneath him. He doesn't think she's seeing anybody right now (she's making out with him, _so_ ) but he's heard a little about this guy he already hates, named Sam or Lamb or something dumb like that.

Jess starts to smile.

\---

His dad slaps him on the back the first time he meets Jess, calls him Nicky No-Balls, and tries to sell Jess his Ma's old handheld video poker game. So that goes about as well as expected.

But Jess likes Chicago. She meets Winston and the two of them hit it off like gangbusters, and she spends a long time looking solemnly out at Lake Michigan when Nick takes her down to the shoreline, the two of them hopping public transit and walking hand-in-hand along the boardwalk. She only stays for a couple days before flying on to Portland to spend Christmas with her family, though. Nick spends the rest of winter break alternating between moping around his room and yelling at his extended family that _pre-law_ is not the same as _law school_ and that they all need to quit with the calling him Nicky Miller, Esquire already.

(He ignores the weird thump of panic he gets whenever he thinks about law school.)

\---

They break up for the second time in the middle of his junior year.

It's worse than the first time.

\---

Jess avoids him, and Schmidt is _really_ into Elizabeth right now, so it's a lonely semester. Nick starts chatting with this girl named Amelia and goes on a string of dates with Caroline, the TA from his Biology class (it doesn't raise his Bio grade). He applies for, and gets into the law school program at Syracuse, so, you know, there's another three years of his life down the crapper at SU. He knows that Jess was thinking of moving out to L.A. after graduation, crashing with her best friend from back in Portland who is trying to make it out there as a model. He wonders if that's a thing she still thinks about.

They start talking again, tentatively, during the fall of their senior year. Jess is friends with Elizabeth and it's easy to fall into a pattern: the four of them, hanging out at some dive bar, drinking pitchers. Nobody's surprised when he and Jess start making out again after they've had a few too many. He's never understood this _thing_ they have between them, this spark of _something_ , but sometimes all he can think about is how painfully obvious it is that the world wants them to be together, just like this.

Graduation looms in the distance, but Jess doesn't talk about her future plans with him anymore. She doesn't bug him about where the two of them are going, you know, _as a couple_. She never mentions Cece.

And part of Nick is relieved, because those are the discussions he hated, the things that led to them breaking up the first couple times around. But it also makes him nervous, like there's an itch under his skin he can't quite get to. She never brings it up - just kisses him whenever he opens his dumb mouth, and that's that.

A week before graduation, she tells him she's moving to L.A. in June.

By herself.

\---

The airport is crowded, and Nick doesn't have enough money to buy himself an el cheapo ticket to get past security. They stand awkwardly in front of the TSA station, not saying anything. Jess finally kisses him gently on the cheek.

"You going to be okay, Miller?" she asks, and a voice inside of him screams, beats at the ribs across his chest, _NO, no, I won’t, don't leave me, don't don't don't_.

But he shrugs and says, "Sure.”

She nods and shifts her giant airplane-craft-bag up higher on her shoulder.

He watches her go through security: taking off her shoes, talking to the gate agent, putting her shoes back on. She turns back and waves at him before turning the corner into the airport, and Nick waves back and thinks, _I am never going to see her again_.

He starts law school in the fall. He never finishes.

 

 

\---

**Bar.**

She walks into the bar with a ring on her finger.

She's not a regular - Nick's pretty sure he would've remembered her. He's been pulling double shifts lately, working overtime to avoid everything in his life he doesn't want to deal with: the one-two punch of Schmidt and Elizabeth's college reunion sex tour. Winston's slow motion breakup with Shelby. Coach disappearing, ignoring emails and texts and calls and everything from his old life. Caroline's increasing insistence that they move in together, get this show on the road, get down and serious and start pumping out scary things like babies and home-cooked meals and regular paychecks, so Nick can fade like a ghost into adulthood, just like Coach did.

The woman fidgets with her ring as she sips a glass of rosé. It's a silver number, a single diamond with an unadorned band. She keeps twisting it around her finger. As he watches, she finally, decisively, takes it off and sticks it in her purse.

She orders a second glass of wine.

\---

"So, what's your name?" he asks. She's happy and a little giggly a couple glasses in, eyes bright and cheeks flushed, leaning up onto the bar on her elbows to chat with him.

She hesitates for a split second before blurting out "Katie!" She snorts a sharp, weird laugh at that.

He asks about her job, and she starts telling him punchy little stories about life as a teacher and the time she spent living with a bunch of L.A. models after college ("It's like the Hunger Games, only, like, really _literal_?"). He knows he's ignoring the other customers - Big Bob gives him a slow sideways look as he picks up the slack, which is the Big Bob equivalent of throwing down and calling out - but she throws back her head and laughs with her entire body at something dumb he says, and he can't tear himself away.

She slips up once and mentions some guy named Spencer, but Nick steps right past that and launches into his current theory on why people believe the whole moon landing _thing_ , the idiots. Katie bites her tongue as she nods in agreement with him, her fingers slipping along the thin stem of her wine glass. Up and down, up and down. Her eyelashes are long and dramatic, like dark little wings. When she smiles Nick feels something unknot inside of him he hadn't even realized was there.

They celebrate her third glass of wine by cheering and shouting "Threefer!" together.

Nick starts chasing shots to keep up with her.

A couple hours later, right before closing, Katie pulls him, laughing, into the men's bathroom. She throws herself at him as soon as the door locks, launching herself up at his face in front of the urinal and the scuff marks along the bottom tiles of the wall. Nick catches her around the waist, her skirt flared out under his fingertips.

When their lips touch for the first time it's like galaxies expand and contract all at once inside of him. Cold and hot chase up his veins.

He thinks, _Caroline_. He thinks about the silver ring in Katie's purse, thrown somewhere on the floor at their feet. He slips a hand up underneath her skirt instead. She tips her head back in front of him, exposing her throat, lips parted the tiniest amount, her pupils dilated wide, and she _moans_.

He knows this is wrong, wrong, wrong. He's never cheated on Caroline. This is -

\---

He gives her a piggyback ride back to his place, after. She's chatty and loose, arms looped around his neck, wearing bicycle shorts underneath her skirt that she'd triumphantly fished out of her purse when they were trying to make themselves presentable again. Her chin bumps pleasantly against his shoulder as he walks.

They finally make it to his apartment. She reaches over, elbow resting on his shoulder, to trace the stenciling of the 4D sign with her fingertip.

"You gotta be quiet, okay?" he says. "My roommates can't know you're here."

She puts her lips close to his ear, and he can feel her smile. "Like a mouse."

\---

He wakes up in the middle of the night, his arm trapped and asleep underneath her body, his nose buried in Katie's ridiculous, glossy hair. He rolls away from her, onto his back, and stares up at the ceiling, washed out in the dim grey that passes for night in L.A.

\---

When he wakes up the next morning, Katie's gone.

Nick lets Schmidt push some sort of terrible health-wheat-grass-god-knows-what smoothie on him for breakfast and spends the hour after that staring down his phone. He finally dials. When Caroline answers, he manages to finally force out the words he's been rehearsing since he woke up.

Three weeks later, he moves in with Caroline. Schmidt buys them a cappuccino maker as a gift, even though neither of them drinks cappuccino, and kisses Nick fast and hard on the mouth. Everybody laughs politely. Nick talks with a couple Caroline knows from her last job who do real estate in the city. He genially complains about the lackluster beer selection that Caroline had picked out. He helps do dishes afterward, then catches up on the baseball scores before climbing into bed with Caroline. She kisses him on the nose as he wraps himself around her and asks, voice fuzzy and warm, on the verge on sleep, "Now, isn't this better?"

He says yes.

 

 

\---

**Chicago.**

February in Chicago is a pretty fucking dreary time to kick the bucket.

"Bodies freak me out," Schmidt says in a weird, fast cadence, and flees the room. Winston takes one look at the open casket and starts to cry, mumbling the words _greatest man I knew_ under his breath. Nick feels numb. He's pretty sure the body in front of him isn't his dad, because the Walt Miller he knew never stayed still for anything - fingers twitching against tweed pants, feet tapping under the table, eyes narrowed at Nick when he was seven years old and Walt was teaching him to count cards at the kitchen counter, the dishwasher swishing quietly to itself in the background.

So, yeah. He's pretty sure this body, laid out with hands crossed like a vampire, isn't his dad. Even if it does have a pretty spectacular mustache.

\---

His room hasn't changed since he moved out. It's a shrine to his seventeen year old self, desperate and lonely in his overwhelming desire to get the hell out of town; being home makes him feel awkward and sweaty and nervous around girls all over again. He grabs one of his dad's battered Hunter S. Thompson paperbacks and puts his feet up on the faded quilt. It feels so normal that when he hears a scratching at the window, he automatically says _come in_ before he thinks twice about it.

Jess trips over the window sill. She executes a complex, free-form fall into his room, like a giraffe discovering the effects of gravity in slow motion, before sticking the landing at the last second in a moment of sheer human triumph. It's weird and so quintessentially Jess that it makes something inside of him hurt a little bit, watching her.

 _His_ Jess, the one he remembers, is cheerful and a little plump, sporting coke-bottle glasses and an inability to dress in matching patterns or color schemes. Jessie Day, the girl next door, who had snuck into his room most nights after they'd called the Great Truce of '94. He'd spent his first couple years as a teenager bemoaning her general existence before taking a hard turn, almost overnight, into since-unmatched levels of single-minded teenage lust. (He's pretty sure that Jess still doesn't know how obsessed he'd been with her back then. It's probably for the best.)

And then he'd left for college, riding high on scholarships and the promise inherent in the words _pre-law_ , before all those dreams fell away and all he was left with was a shitty job tending bar in a city he can barely afford. She'd stayed behind to pick up her teaching certificate. She teaches at the middle school down the block now, the baby fat gone, hair done up in ridiculous rag-doll curls, with sharp blue eyes and a thick belt wrapped around an hour-glass waist.

Jess wears _lipstick_ now. He always forgets that.

He licks a finger to fold back the corner of his page, setting the book down at his side slowly.

"Hi Nicholas," she says, a little tentatively, in her throaty smoker's voice. She had sounded like somebody's grandma even back in high school. The other girls had made fun of it behind her back, but Nick had always liked it. He thought her voice sounded warm and scratchy, like an LP worn thin because you played it too much, or a wool blanket in the middle of winter.

"My dad's dead," he hears himself say, instead of something normal like _hey_ or _lookin' good, Day_ or _what's a woman like you doing in a bedroom like this_ , and somehow that's finally the thing that makes it real: Jess in his room, like it's high school all over again, smoothing a hand nervously over a skirt with (let's face it) some pretty in-your-face polka-dotting.

His dad's dead.

He starts to cry for the first time, ugly and from the gut.

\---

The funeral is a disaster. The Elvis impersonator melts down halfway through a drunken rendition of "Are You Lonesome Tonight," and his mother can't keep it together after that. The only thing that saves the day is the wake at the Miller house afterwards, his family toasting Walt at regular intervals, generating goodwill through sheer, boneheaded repetition.

Winston hugs Jess hard when he sees her, both of them reminiscing about the various horrible schemes Walt had dragged them into as kids.

"My junior year, Mr. Miller convinced me to buy a share in a racehorse with the money I saved up from my summer job," Jess tells them, laughing a little. She twirls the paper umbrella from her drink, acting for all the world like the whole racehorse debacle was a good memory and not the night Nick had ended up pants-less and dancing like a poorly adjusted puppet in front of a couple low-level Russian mobsters.

Nick mostly remembers the summer after their junior year as the first time he tried to kiss Jess, both of them splayed out like starfish on top of his bed in the middle of a Chicago heat wave. She'd practically thrown herself out the window when she realized where he was going with his awkward moves, eyes wide and barking out short, manic laughter. She'd flushed up beet red around him for weeks. He'd wanted to stab himself in the ear drums every time he heard her nervous giggling after that.

(It wasn't until the summer after that, after they'd graduated and he'd been accepted to college, that she tried to kiss him back.)

\---

Nick drinks a lot of Scotch that night. A _lot_ of Scotch. Jess climbs back through his window after the party's over and the house is quiet again, and settles herself between his body and the wall. She curls up next to him in the twin bed like they used to years ago, pressing skin up against damp skin, back when that was the most overwhelming sensation either of them could imagine.

She reaches behind his neck and scratches her fingers up his scalp. "You okay, Nick Knack?"

He shivers, rolling his body in toward her. "Drunk," he whispers. "Dead dad. Other words that start with D." He slips a hand up over her hip, tucking himself closer into her.

She's quiet for a long time, her fingers rubbing absently at the stubble at the back of his neck. His eyes start to drift closed.

"Why..." She clears her throat. "You never come back, Nick. Not even for Christmas. Your mom says you always miss your flight."

"It's hard," he mumbles finally, because he doesn't know how to answer the question he thinks she's asking. He's way too drunk for this. A sloppy well of sadness bubbles up inside of him, threatening to slosh over and drown him, so he presses his nose into her hair. It smells familiar, like citrus and clean soap (because that's what Jess's hair has always smelled like), and somehow that makes everything worse and better, all at the same time. 

She wraps an arm around his shoulders and doesn't say anything else.

\---

L.A. is saturated with sunlight, throwing sharp shadows at his feet. The rays of the sun hurt his eyes as he leaves the airport.

Chicago's already fading pleasantly away, washing out in the harsh light - Jess regressing back to the chubby, middle school version of herself who drove him absolutely crazy, his dad alive and kicking in some distant place where they never talk on the phone, or at all, really. He picks up an extra shift at the bar. He wakes up the next morning with a comfortable hangover and the distant, tantalizing smell of Schmidt making breakfast in the kitchen. Sometimes he forgets he ever lived anywhere other than L.A.

 

 

\---

**Apartment 4D.**

"Hey, dummy, move it," Jess says, and slaps the bottom of Nick's bare feet just when he's gotten comfortable lying on the couch. She waves a pint of ice cream and two spoons in Nick's face as motivation, but Winston is the only one who perks up at that.

"Chocolate chip?" Winston asks.

"Get it, get it, son," Jess raps, pulling out a little hip thrust/dig with the ice cream before tossing the carton and one of the spoons to Winston. She pokes at Nick's toes again. "C'mon, Nick. Don't make me sit on your feet. You know I'll do it."

Nick scowls at that, glares, and begrudgingly lifts his feet up a couple inches.

Jess sticks her spoon into her mouth to free her hands, sucking at the clean metal like a lollipop. She slips onto the couch, then grabs his ankles and pulls Nick's feet firmly back onto her lap.

"Finally," Schmidt says, pressing play on the Blu-Ray remote. "Let's get this show on the road."

 

 

\---

_Here, when I say I never want to be without you,_  
_somewhere else I am saying_  
_I never want to be without you again. And when I touch you_  
_in each of the places we meet,_

_in all of the lives we are, it’s with hands that are dying_  
_and resurrected._  
_When I don’t touch you it’s a mistake in any life,_  
_in each place and forever._

\- [Other Lives And Dimensions And Finally A Love Poem](http://april-is.tumblr.com/post/87736762/april-16-2005-other-lives-and-dimensions-and-finally)  
Bob Hicok

**Author's Note:**

> If you enjoyed this story and would like to share it, please consider reblogging [this post](http://blithers.tumblr.com/post/71859924218/yuletide-story-i-wrote-2) on tumblr!


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